The Silver Birthday

I turned 25 this last weekend. You can see a good chunk of what the last couple years of my life have been about on these peanut butter and jelly cupcakes. Yes they were delicious. The cupcakes themselves came from my buddy over at Man Bakes Cake, but the designs were all Dana, down to the random bar sign with my family name on it we found over in west midtown months ago.

The whole weekend felt like a party. There was the big day itself of course, getting handed a bottle of bubbly at midnight on the house just as the dance floor started getting more and more crowded. Then a picnic on a perfect day in central park, walking by one of my favorite bands from Colombia playing live, a good dinner, then the main party in the Lower East Side in the middle of an art exhibition with impromptu live jazz.

What with the rooftop parties and karaoke in the days following, I felt like I was on vacation well into the next Tuesday, when I realized I'd missed a deadline to pick up my extra headshots from a theater and an important phone call to my college's career guidance office the previous day. Oops.

There's always something kind of sad seeing your potential turned into your story, even if it's a good story. It's especially weird realizing that things that used to be a huge part of your life just aren't really present anymore, (in my case things like basketball, biking, video games, international politics, salsa dancing... I should probably stop there). The story of what I've done the first 25 years of my life is one I think anybody would be proud of. But it's permanent now. No wondering what I'll do with that part of my life. But as anyone older than me will point out, I've still got plenty of life and potential ahead of me if all goes according to plan. Sure, I have regrets, but not many. I personally believe that anyone who claims to have no regrets in life is either lying or hasn't taken enough risks.

So here I am, a twenty-five-year-old professional actor between jobs, in Spanish Harlem, barely paying rent, while getting invites to Open Bar Surrealist Pool Parties on Facebook ("Featuring Five Award Winning Artists who will create live, surreal, larger then life installations, in and out of the pool, that will convince you there is something in your drink!") I've got a stack of new good books to read and $17.40 leftover credit to the Drama Book Shop that I don't know what to do with yet. No TV, shared internet with my neighbors, a weighted Piano Keyboard, a voiceover demo currently in production, Mariners/Yankees tickets the night before SAT tutor training, and airline tickets home for a couple weeks in August. And a few other things besides. Mostly plans. I have a lot of big plans and ideas. Who knows what will happen with them.

Happy birthday to me.